would become like blood running through the
veins of Mexico. Great galleons would wait at
Vera Cruz to carry it across the Atlantic to
enrich the Spanish crown and shake the econ
omies of Europe, while other galleons would
wait at Acapulco to transport it across the
Pacific to Manila to be exchanged for the silks
and spices of Asia.
oP AND AMIDST the greatest maze of
mines rose Guanajuato, queen city of
the Bajio, my first destination. I
disembarked El Constitucionalista
at its last stop, San Miguel de Allende, and
drove to Guanajuato. A tunnel following an
old river course leads into the city.
My first impression was that I had slipped
out of the 20th century. It was dusk. The
city, which overflows the floor of a narrow
canyon, seemed a softly colored palette of
stucco and adobe. University students in
Renaissance costumes strolled with guitars
and mandolins as they sang serenades, one of
the rituals of Guanajuato's annual Cervantes
festival. Lanterns illuminated many of the
steep twisting streets with hidden plazas and
ornate old churrigueresque churches. Even a
hundred years ago horse-drawn carriages
couldn't manage these streets. The faces of
passersby reflected the long-ago merging of
cultures and peoples drawn to the mines:
Spanish conquerors, Indians, Africans
slaves and freemen.
I wanted first to see one of the great old
mines. So one morning, from the open eleva
tor we shared, foreman Emiliano Torres
Rivera signaled by whistling to an invisible
operator, and down we dropped ... 1,100
feet into the heart of the Rayas Mine.
Mining tunnels branch in every direction
beneath the city, some five miles of them,
Emiliano estimated. "I began as a peon," he
said, "filling up cars with a shovel and a
bucket. Then we had to pull and push the
cars a long way." He grimaced, remember
ing, then flashed the smile that seems to come
so easily to faces here.
In the 1970s Rayas and other mines
modernized, bringing in pneumatic shovels
Scars from past corridas lie hidden beneath
matador Rodolfo Rodriguez's "suitof lights."
Gored 12 times in 22 years, he emerged
unharmed on this Sunday in San Miguel de
Allende. The bulls did not.
Mexico's Bajio-The Heartland